Back to index

10:7

(In »The free and open Internet versus the ecological apocalypse«)

The healing potential of the syntheist faith shines most brightly when strangers are randomly brought together around their common humanity in the temporary utopia, such as at the spontaneous meetings that occur on the playa at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, possibly the largest remaining meeting place in the world where an exchange of calling cards would be regarded as vulgar and sacrilegious. It is there and then that the syntheist dream of the religious intersubject is realised. A you and an I become an emergent we that is tangibly far greater than the sum of its parts, and the proof that this is the case is that, if anything, the we is strengthened by the spontaneous meeting’s participants going their separate ways. The you and the I don’t just become the we, they also become directly interchangeable with each other; agentiality within the phenomenon is set in motion, reshaped and radicalised, and expands.